Hot Apps: Sleep Cycle & The iPad Craze

Last night Nick Denton tweeted about standing outside Ssam Bar in Manhattan with "7 Gizmodo guys, 7 iPhones, 6 iPads" (see pic above). Meanwhile, I unboxed my iPad yesterday and spent the evening trying to figure out what the heck it was going to do better than my computer and iPhone.

My hunch is that it's not going to do anything the others do, and it's going to be great for reading and games. But I don't HAVE any iBooks or game apps yet, so right now it's just a very pretty piece of hardware at my deskside (tho, I just found a nice list of reviewed apps over at Gizmodo, so this is where the action is right now. I can't wait till Gregory at Unplggd starts pulling in and reviewing more domestic apps).

Meanwhile, I want to share with you a really good, addictive little app that Sara and I have been using on our iPhones for the past few months. It's called Sleep Cycle and it's an alarm clock that measures your sleep, so that you can wake up at the perfect time in your sleep cycle.

My night last night. Not a great night. Had to get up once in the middle of the night due to the leaky AC. I wouldn't have any memory of when that happened, had it not been for this handy little app.

Here's one of the pics that shows where you put it after setting the clock.

Here's the info:

The Sleep Cycle alarm clock is a bio-alarm clock that analyzes your sleep patterns and wakes you when you are in the lightest sleep phase. Waking up in the lightest sleep phase feels like waking without an alarm clock - it is a natural way to wake up where you feel rested and relaxed.

Since you move differently in bed during the different phases, Sleep Cycle uses the accelerometer in your iPhone to monitor your movement to determine which sleep phase you are in.

And here's a demo graph that shows the three levels of movement that are read by the phone and what they correlate to.

And here's one of my better night's sleep from a week ago. Not that you'd want to, but you can also email and facebook your results to your best friends. :-)